Until the powers that be add a tick box for "this play was face to face" then we are going to have to just guess to what extent the totals are being influenced by blocks of online plays. I am guessing this would be an easy feature to add and it would make me very happy if it was.

Unfortunately until the powers that be limit the total plays a user can log in a single day down to single digits then the odd nutty entry makes the total plays stats rather useless.

Take a look at this user. 81 face-to-face plays of a one game on a single day (and 60+ on a few more days):

HilkMAN wrote:

Hard to believe, but Love Letter (Japanese version) takes sometimes only seconds to play (especially with two players). My daughter is seriously addicted to it now - and I had to accompany her to the hospital for five days. Since that was mostly boring, we played plenty of Love Letter there, although I don't even really like it with 2.

If people are allowed to log online games, even high triple digits are possible. I know somebody who played 734 two player games of Can't Stop on BSW in one session (29 hours).

If people are allowed to log online games, even high triple digits are possible. I know somebody who played 734 two player games of Can't Stop on BSW in one session (29 hours).

Oh I have a simple solution to this. Tough.

Limit the number of single plays in a day to 9 and let those who exceed this limit worry about how they get round the system. Spreading their entries over several days could be an option I guess. The interests of the majority eclipse the needs of the few.

Another simple way round is to let folk enter what the heck they like but put an upper limit (9 plays) on the info that gets passed through to the stats of the collective.

This is not one of those problems that requires a load of head scratching and hours of programing time.

Granted you've just gotten this back up and I'm asking for more, but I'd love to see it broken out by play length. If there was a way to look at games played that take less than an hour, an hour, two hours, etc. that would provide significant additional insight. Comparing Through the Ages plays to Dominion plays doesn't provide a fair comparison.

As long as you're in the code I'd love to see categories too. What's the hot wargame this month?

Limit the number of single plays in a day to 9 and let those who exceed this limit worry about how they get round the system. Spreading their entries over several days could be an option I guess. The interests of the majority eclipse the needs of the few.

The interest of the majority is to be able to log their plays as they see it fit.

This includes being able to log the 340 plays in 6 days on the correct date (and later look back and remember "that was the time when my daughter was at the hospital").

This includes the ability to log the online plays for one month on the last day of the month (i played 34 online games of Atlantis on BSW in a january, but don't care what date it was).

The ability to use that personal record information to create statistics is only a side effect, not the point of the system.

It's well known that there are people who play dozens of games of Dominion, Race for the Galaxy, Puzzle Strike, and Yomi each day. I have played 80+ games of RftG in a day on occasion, and I know I am at the low end.

Your then let them record their cake-eating tomorrow solution is a nonsolution.

It's well-known that there are people who play dozens of games of Dominion, Race for the Galaxy, Puzzle Strike, and Yomi each day. I have played 80+ games of RftG in a day on occasion, and I know I am at the low end.

It's well-known that there are people who play dozens of games of Dominion, Race for the Galaxy, Puzzle Strike, and Yomi each day. I have played 80+ games of RftG in a day on occasion, and I know I am at the low end.

I am vastly over-employed.

S.

No one got to the end of their life and said "Damn, I wish I had spent more time working at the office!"

On the other hand, probably very few people get to the end of their life and say "Damn, I wish I had played more than just a few dozen games of Dominion each day"...

I just want to know what games are getting played face to face and how often. I don't mind what personal records people keep for online plays as long as the information can be stripped out of the collective data. If there was a simple tick box to classify a play as face to face then I'd be happy. Actually it looks to me that by doing this everyone would be happy. It is these online blocks of plays that currently spoil the statistical usefulness of the information that has been recorded by thousands of us geeks.

I just want to know what games are getting played face to face and how often. I don't mind what personal records people keep for online plays as long as the information can be stripped out of the collective data. If there was a simple tick box to classify a play as face to face then I'd be happy. Actually it looks to me that by doing this everyone would be happy. It is these online blocks of plays that currently spoil the statistical usefulness of the information that has been recorded by thousands of us geeks.

FWIW I don't care about that and would probably not use it, since I already use the location field (with multiple locations for various online sites (e.g. KGS, littlegolem, superdupergames) and multiple locations for various physical sites (e.g. various friends' homes, restaurants, conventions, etc)), and it doesn't matter to me for collective data whether I played a game of Go on a wooden board or a virtual board.

I just want to know what games are getting played face to face and how often. I don't mind what personal records people keep for online plays as long as the information can be stripped out of the collective data. If there was a simple tick box to classify a play as face to face then I'd be happy. Actually it looks to me that by doing this everyone would be happy. It is these online blocks of plays that currently spoil the statistical usefulness of the information that has been recorded by thousands of us geeks.

FWIW I don't care about that and would probably not use it, since I already use the location field (with multiple locations for various online sites (e.g. KGS, littlegolem, superdupergames) and multiple locations for various physical sites (e.g. various friends' homes, restaurants, conventions, etc)), and it doesn't matter to me for collective data whether I played a game of Go on a wooden board or a virtual board.

So is the total time spent playing Agricola going up month on month or is it just that folk are entering iOS plays. Do we collectively spend more time playing Tzolkin or Carcassonne? Which are the top 100 games that we as a collective are playing the most? I'm not the only person interested in this information and it could easily be provided with the addition of a simple tick box "was this play face to face?"

So is the total time spent playing Agricola going up month on month or is it just that folk are entering iOS plays. Do we collectively spend more time playing Tzolkin or Carcassonne? Which are the top 100 games that we as a collective are playing the most? I'm not the only person interested in this information and it could easily be provided with the addition of a simple tick box "was this play face to face?"

Why does it matter to you if someone played Agricola on a computer or on a cardboard board? Aren't they playing Agricola either way?

Why does it matter to you if someone played Agricola on a computer or on a cardboard board?

It matters to me, though I don't use the stat very much. Online plays distort the hell out of the numbers. One guy punching out 120 games of Dominion on his iPhone in a day doesn't hold any credibility with me. He's an outlier. Unfortunately he's the equivalent of 40 game nights in the data.

None of this data is particularly rigorous or credible, but with spiked data like that the graph has two bumps that are being averaged together into one number.

I'd take more information away from a report that simply counted "1" for each user that logs at least one play in a day. That's an indication of someone coming back to a title repeatedly over a significant time period, and likely a better indication of how a typical purchaser of a physical copy should expect the game to perform.

So is the total time spent playing Agricola going up month on month or is it just that folk are entering iOS plays. Do we collectively spend more time playing Tzolkin or Carcassonne? Which are the top 100 games that we as a collective are playing the most? I'm not the only person interested in this information and it could easily be provided with the addition of a simple tick box "was this play face to face?"

Why does it matter to you if someone played Agricola on a computer or on a cardboard board? Aren't they playing Agricola either way?

It took me several years to get up to 13 face to face plays of Agricola. I have probably played 30 games on my iPad in the last couple of weeks. The investment in time is in a different league.

Personally when reading opinion on this site and when browsing stats I try to strip out and discard information provided by people who are overly influenced by the online experience and people who are overly influenced by the playing with just them and the spouse. I am interested in information provided by "club / convention" gamers because this information best matches my situation.

More than anything the spoiling of the games played stats by maybe one person in 200 entering massive blocks of hundreds of plays just plain bugs me.

It took me several years to get up to 13 face to face plays of Agricola. I have probably played 30 games on my iPad in the last couple of weeks. The investment in time is in a different league.

OK, but why does that matter? After I've learned a complicated wargame, the later plays are much faster than the early slow learning plays; should I not log them?

And in any case, the time difference is not true for all games! E.g. I play a game of realtime Go online at KGS in a similar amount of time as I play Go face-to-face, e.g. an hour or so.

To say nothing of correspondence games, which go far SLOWER than face-to-face. Should people similarly not log (or somehow mark separately) correspondence games?

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Personally when reading opinion on this site and when browsing stats I try to strip out and discard information provided by people who are overly influenced by the online experience and people who are overly influenced by the playing with just them and the spouse. I am interested in information provided by "club / convention" gamers because this information best matches my situation.

I am still confused why you are doing that, though, or what problem you are trying to solve. Why does it matter if you play Agricola more often or less often, or faster or slower, than other people in clubs / conventions?

If your group is slow and takes 2 hours typically to play Agricola, and you can only fit one play into an evening, would you want to dismiss / ignore the logged plays of someone whose group is much faster and plays in 30 or 40 minutes (with the physical set) and logs 3 or 4 plays in an evening? I suppose not. So what's the difference when the players are faster because they play with a computer?

Is there some meta-competition I don't know about to see who can play & log the most games of Agricola?

Or are you talking about using # of logged plays to decide whether to buy a game? That seems weird; surely reviews and players' game comments are far more useful for that. At least to me: I care what a game is like, not whether lots of other people play it.

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More than anything the spoiling of the games played stats by maybe one person in 200 entering massive blocks of thousands of plays just plain bugs me.

I agree with this. The 999999 logged plays of Magic the Gathering are obvious nonsense which have nothing to do with games played in any form, whether real cards, computer bits, or chiseled stone tablets...